Review: Stargate - The Movie (Director's Cut)

Deutsche Version untenThis is a customer review I wrote for the Amazon web site.

O'Neil with one L, and no sense of humor...

It is hard to put a label on this movie. At least the first half has too much of an accent on the story to be an action film, but for a "serious" movie, the second half is a little thin. Nonetheless a movie that introduces us to a wonderful world and laid the foundation for the successful TV series.

Fans of the TV-show should be advised that Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin explicitly distanced themselves from Brad Wright's and Jonathan Glassner's work. People interested in Emmerich's version can obtain a novelized version of the sequel films that never came to be in the form of the books Stargate: Rebellion, Stargate: Retaliation und Stargate: Retribution (at Amazon "Stargate 3") by Bill McKay. While I doubt that the sequel films would have described the politics in as much detail, the story nonetheless has a charm of its own, even though the Goa'uld, the Jaffa, the DHD and and many other things from the TV-show of course don't exist in that universe.

About the DVD: The additional scenes of the Director's cut manage to shed a new light on O'Neil. Especially Ra and the first "SG-team" around Kawalski and Ferretti get a few more scenes that help round out the characters. The fact that these new scenes weren't color-corrected and thus tend to look a little bit on the pale side will go unnoticed by most viewers until the second viewing and is therefore not much of a problem.

Of course the commentary track by both creators is the best feature of the extras (even though it is obvious that a lot of time has passed since the movie was recorded), closely followed by the Stargate Promo Reel. This near-silent collage of scenes that happened before post-production had finished paints an incredibly athmospherical picture of the movie. Fans will love it.